Seems like hardly a week goes by without some fresh academic fakery scandal coming to light.
This week’s: A Florida State University professor, Eric Stewart, who resigned from his cushy job at the taxpayer-funded school amid allegations that he’d simply made up data for a study purporting to show racism against blacks and Latinos in criminal sentencing.
Aside from the moral ugliness of his alleged crime — falsifying data solely to stoke up racial resentment — it’s a complete betrayal of universities’ mission.
And paid for by everyday Sunshine Staters, to boot.
But Stewart is far from the only offender here.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist now serving as the president of ultra-elite Stanford, is being investigated for publishing papers with manipulated images in them.
Four former Harvard cancer scientists had a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted for seeming data manipulation in February.
Former Yale biologist Carlo Spirli was identified this month as a serial data faker by the Office of Research Integrity, a federal watchdog.
Three top institutions; three major cases of professorial scamming — all from just the first quarter of this year.
And that’s to say nothing of the so-called "paper mills" found in China, Iran
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These are scuzzy commercial entities that generate papers based on shoddy, cooked or outright fake data and shop them to reputable journals on behalf of the crooked "authors" in hopes of scoring a publication.
Or the "replication crisis" — a beyond-disturbing phenomenon across psychology, sociology, economics and medicine in which the results reported in papers from august institutions can’t be duplicated.
Yet replicability is a foundational element of good research.
In psychology, the non-replicating research accounts for up to 62% of papers. In economics, 39%.
That doesn’t necessarily mean all the unreplicated papers were fake.
But it doesn’t say anything good about data integrity, either.
Look: Most academics, we think, are still honest, hardworking people.
But the huge incentives to cheat — it’s publish or perish! — and the until-recently quite low likelihood of getting caught would put temptation in the way of a saint.
And let’s not forget that as the universities have become more politicized, so too has research.